Edwin

[on the making of "Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly"] "Although most foreigners didn’t quite catch the cultural references or understand the background (Indonesian social history), many understood and identified with the overall feeling of alienation. And that’s important to me: when the film is liberated from having to explain any facts or history or background, it independently expresses a strong feeling of confusion, unease, restlessness and even fear."

Miguel Gomes

“Cinema is a game.”

Ulrich Seidl

“If I manage to make people laugh with my films and their laughter gets stuck in their throat in the next moment, if I succeed in doing that, then that makes me happy.”

Amir Naderi

“When I’m filming, I’m just focused on what I want to do. I shut out everything else in the world and just focus on that. And I made the people working with me do that as well. No cell phones, no life, no nothing.”

Giorgos Lanthimos

Eric Khoo

“The suppression in Singapore and Asia in general works for me. It’s one of the reasons why, after I graduated from L.A., I moved back to Singapore — because for me art is always about pushing boundaries or testing the limits and making people see things differently. It’s actually fuel for my creativity.”

Matthew Porterfield

“I try to rely a lot on my own intuition, on what I think about the frame. It’s better maybe not to be too dogmatic about the things you’d like to see.”

Kelly Reichardt

“I like working in a really private way. I mean, we got as far as a cut of [Old Joy] without speaking to any kind of lawyer or anything. We got into Sundance before we thought we should form a company. Aside from a lot of sound work and stuff still to go, it was all very private, and that’s a dream for me.”

Markus Schleinzer

Ulrich Köhler

Martin Arnold

“The cinema of Hollywood is a cinema of exclusion, reduction and denial, a cinema of repression. There is always something behind that which is being represented, which was not represented. And it is exactly that that is most interesting to consider.”

Rob Epstein

Athina Rachel Tsangari

Ludwig Wüst

Pedro González-Rubio

Michel Gondry

“Every great idea is on the verge of being stupid.”

Abbas Kiarostami

“But in all, I don't like to engage in telling stories. I don't like to arouse the viewer emotionally or give him advice. I don't like to belittle him or burden him with a sense of guilt. These are the things I don't like in the movies.”

Christoph Hochhäusler

Jean-Marie Straub

“It is the dividing lines that make one’s public. And the dividing lines end up in one way or another being lines which correspond to the lines of class, and class struggle.”

Nobuhiro Suwa